Rosemarie Trockel
Zum Beispiel Balthasar, 6 Jahre, 1996 Video, 9.15 min. Music: Christoph John
It begins with a laughing boy. In slow motion, the camera follows the little boy, a girl and two dogs in a beautiful landscape in summer. The boy is dressed like a grown man in an old-fashioned suit, white shirt and hat. He is carrying a suitcase. The girl walks by his side. Now the young couple is drying each other’s tears. Could it be a farewell? The boy is on his way somewhere – perhaps out into the world? The pair stops in this Eden-like setting to watch a bird of prey circling high in the sky with a killed animal in its claws. An omen for the dark side of life?
The road leads them to a little village with a chapel, which they enter. The boy rings on a bell that hangs in front of the crucifix; he is suddenly a child again, hanging on the bell rope. The scene changes and the boy is in the village school gym, again hanging on a rope. He is laughing, as at the beginning of the film. Swinging on his rope in the physical education class, is he dreaming about how life will be when he grows up? As in most of Trockel’s films, music is central. Beispiel Balthasar, 6 Jahrea beautiful, melancholy parable about life and our dreams.
Mr. Sun, 1999 Video, 3.13 min.
In the mid-’80s, Rosemarie Trockel began investigating the connections between art and society from the female perspective. Her oven theme began in the late ’80s with three-dimensional floor-based sculptures in the shape of ovens. Starting in 1991, suspended pictures of ovens began appearing, with realistic hot-plates sunk into enamelled sheets. The leap from ovens to eroticism is not a large one for Trockel, at least not in Mr. Sun.
Brigitte Bardot seductively sings the song of that name, where the sun (in French, a masculine word) is a metaphor for male eroticism – the heat the singer wants to be consumed by. Simultaneously, the camera moves in soft, erotic strokes back and forth over a Heiliger (Saint) brand toy electric kitchen range from the 1950s. Saints are not meant to be stroked, certainly not in public! In this, a woman is defying a taboo, and as Bardot sings of her longing to feel ‘his’ warmth, the camera penetrates the dark oven. The artist’s feminine eye makes the oven (in German, also a masculine word) a metaphor for steamy, erotic masculinity.
Here, woman is no longer the object of male fantasies, rather it is man who becomes, in an ironic way, an erotic object for a woman’s desires. But what denominates the male or the female is not always permanent in Trockel’s work. In another video work, Mohn gegen Strom, the oven becomes a woman: Frau Herdhitze (Mrs. Oven-heat).
Iris Müller-Westermann, Curator